<br><br><CENTER><FONT SIZE =4>MALTREATMENT OF SOLDIERS OR MILITARISM AS A REPENTANT,

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YET UNREFORMED SINNER.</FONT></CENTER>

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The militarists are not all dull-witted. That

The militarists are not all dull-witted. That

is proven by the extremely clever educational system they have

is proven by the extremely clever educational system they have

Revision as of 21:49, 7 June 2007

Militarism

by

Karl Liebknecht

IV.

CONCERNING SOME CARDINAL SINS OF MILITARISM.

MALTREATMENT OF SOLDIERS OR MILITARISM AS A REPENTANT,
YET UNREFORMED SINNER.

The militarists are not all dull-witted. That
is proven by the extremely clever educational system they have
introduced. With noteworthy skill they rely upon mass psychology.
The army of Fredericks composed of mercenaries and the scum of
the population, had to be kept together for its mechanical tasks
by pipe-clay drill and thrashings. That is no longer possible
in an army formed on the basis of a civic duty and placing much
greater demands upon the individual. This was clearly recognized
at once by men like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau,[1]
whose army reorganization began with the proclamation of the "freedom
of the back." Yet, bad treatment, brutal insults, beatings
and all kinds of cruel maltreatment belong also to the stock-in-trade
of our present system of military education.

The attitude of military circles toward the
maltreatment of soldiers is naturally not determined by considerations
of ethics, civilization, humanity, justice, Christianity and other
fine things, but purely by jesuitical expedients. The hidden danger
which that maltreatment constitutes for the discipline and the
"spirit" of the army itself[2]
has not even to-day been generally recognized.[3]
The ragging of new recruits and recalcitrants by the older men,
the brutal barracks jokes and vulgar language of all kind, and
the fairly frequent knocks and blows and hazing, are heartily
apt proved without scruple and are even positively considered
necessary by the majority of non-commissioned officers and even
officers, who, estranged from and hostile to the people, have
been trained to become the most narrow-minded petty despots. The
fight against those outrages therefore meets almost at the outset,
with an all but insuperable passive resistance. Privately, but
not publicly, one may hear daily how superiors describe the desire
for decent treatment of the "fellows" as a symptom of
a silly humanitarian soft-headedness. Military service is a rude
business. But even where they have thoroughly recognized the hidden
dangers of disciplinary maltreatments they find themselves again
in face of one of those disagreeable alternatives at which a system
based on brute force and setting itself against the natural development
must always arrive, and several of which we have already pointed
out. For those maltreatments are indeed (as we shall show more
conclusively) indispensable auxiliaries of the external drill
which capitalist militarism, (for which the inward voluntary discipline
is an unattainable goal), can not dispense with for want of a
better method. We repeat that they are considered, not officially,
it is true, but semi-officially, in spite of all the scruples
and regrets we hear expressed, not as a legal, but as an indispensable
means of military education.

But apart from military scruples, our militarists
suffer from a bad conscience since they have been caught at their
game, i.e., since the relentless Social Democratic criticism of
the army institutions began and large portions of the middle-class
commenced to disavow that military morality. With a gnashing of
teeth militarism had to acknowledge that it was not simply devised
and commanded by the supreme war lord, but that it depends, especially
in regard to its material existence, on the popular representative
body on which it looks with such scornful disdain --on the Reichstag
which includes even representatives of the "mob"; in
short, that it depends on the "rabble" and that under
cover of their immunity the people's representatives in the Reichstag
pitilessly exposed its nakedness again and again. In sullen rage
it saw itself obliged to maintain the good mood of those plebeians,
those Reichstag fellows, that despised and derided "public
opinion." The problem was, not to put to too hard a test
the devout belief in militarism possessed by the bourgeoisie who,
as a rule, were ready to grant all possible military demands but
who, especially in times of financial troubles, were not rarely
apt to kick against the pricks, moreover, things had to be made
easier for the bourgeoisie when the latter were dealing with their
voters, largely anti-militarists, because of their social position,
and ready to embrace Social Democracy when they recognize their
class interests. Such weapons as were likely to be most effective
had to be withheld or snatched from Social Democratic propagandists,
so militarism had recourse to the tactics of hushing-up and concealment.
The procedure of the military courts was secret, not a ray penetrated
that darkness, and if one succeeded in penetrating it things were
denied, disputed and extenuated with might and main. But the torch
of Social Democracy sent its light farther and farther, even to
behind the barracks walls and through the bars of the military
prisons and fortresses. The military debates that took place in
the German Reichstag in the eighties and nineties of the last
century constitute a tenacious and passionate fight for the recognition
of the fact that the atrocities of the barracks are not rare and
isolated phenomena but regular, extraordinarily frequent, organic,
constitutional occurrences, as it were, in military life. In that
fight effective service was rendered by the publicity of the procedure
of military courts in other countries, proving that military maltreatment
is a regular attribute of militarism, even of republican militarism
in France, even of Belgian militarism, even in a growing degree
of the Swiss militia militarism.

The impression created by the army orders of
Prince George of Saxony (of June 8, 1891 ), which were published
by the Vorwarts at the beginning of 1892, and by the orders
of the Bavarian war minister( December 13, 1891 ), and by the
Reichstag debates, which lasted from February 15 to 17, 1892,
was mainly responsible for the effect which the Social Democratic
criticism exercised. After the usual "due considerations,,
and scufflings the reform of our procedure in military trials
was brought about in 1898 with a great amount of painful exertion.
True, the reformed procedure still permitted the courts to a large
extent to exclude the public and thus to cover the terrible secrets
of the barracks with the cloak of Christian charity, but it succeeded
(in spite of all the orders which almost suggested the most sweeping
use of the powers of excluding the public and in spite of the
much discussed disciplining of the judges in the Bilse case) in
bringing down such a hail of appalling cases of maltreatment upon
the heads of the public that all objections against the Social
Democratic criticism were simply swept away, and the existence
of the maltreatment of soldiers as a settled institution of "state-conserving"
militarism was acknowledged almost everywhere, however reluctantly.
More or less honestly the authorities attempted to grapple with
this repelling institution which proved of too great an advantage
to the socialist propaganda, and though they did not believe in
any substantial success, they yet wanted to arouse the impression
of dislike for the institution and readiness to try their best
to abolish it. They began to hunt down with a certain amount of
severity those guilty of maltreating soldiers, but militarism
has after all a greater interest in maintaining military discipline,
in training the people in arms to be docile fighters in the struggle
against their own international and national interests than in
attacking the maltreatment of soldiers. It is instructive to compare
the sentences passed upon the basest tormentors of soldiers with
those pronounced almost daily upon soldiers for often quite petty
offences against their superiors, or for of fences committed in
a state of excitement or intoxication by soldiers against their
superiors. For the soldier there is a blood-thirsty, Draconic
punishment for the smallest sin against the holy ghost of militarism;
for the other offender there is, in spite of all, a relatively
mild indulgence and understanding. Thus the campaign of the military
courts against the maltreatment of soldiers, conducted parallel
with a campaign to throttle every vestige of an impulse on the
part of the subordinate to exhibit a consciousness of self-dependence
or equality, naturally fails of practical result. The whole story
is told by the case of the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen
who had sufficient courage to call upon the men themselves to
assist in the campaign against maltreatment so as to be able to
attack the evil more energetically than ever before at the root.
He was, however, soon forced to quit the army on account of this
bold step. The incident brightly illuminates the whole uselessness
and hopelessness of the official campaign against the maltreatment
of soldiers.

The little book written by our comrade Rudolf
Krafft, a former officer of the Bavarian army, on "The Victims
of the Barracks" treats valuable material with the expert
knowledge that can only come from inside information. Regular
compilations of trials for maltreating soldiers (or sailors),
made by the Socialist press at certain intervals, furnish a positively
overwhelming mass of material which has unfortunately not yet
been edited. An important and thankful task is awaiting some one.

Being fundamentally opposed to militarism we
have no delusions about it. Scharnhorst, in his "Order Concerning
Military Punishments," writes: "Experience teaches that
recruits can be taught the drill without beating them. An officer
to whom this may appear impossible lacks the necessary faculty
of instruction or has no clear idea of training." Of course,
theoretically he is right, but practically he is far in advance
of the times. The maltreatment of soldiers springs from the very
essence of capitalist militarism. A large proportion of the men
is intellectually, a still larger proportion physically, not equal
to the military requirements, especially not equal to those of
the parade drill. The number of the young men having a view of
life that is dangerous and hostile to militarism, who enter the
army increases continually. The problem is to tear that soul out
of those "fellows," as it were, and replace it by a
new patriotic soul, loyal to the king. Even the most skilful pedagogue
finds it impossible to solve all those problems, let alone the
land of teachers available to militarism, which must in this respect,
too, be more economical than it would like to be.

The militaristic pedagogues have but a precarious
subsistence. They depend entirely on the good will, on the arbitrariness
of their superior, and must expect every minute to be thrown out
of employment if they do not accomplish their chief task, that
of forming the soldier in the image of militarism -- an excellent
expedient to make the whole apparatus of the military hierarchy
extremely pliant in the hands of the supreme command. It goes
without saying that such superiors drill their men with a nervous
lack of consideration, that they soon come to the point where
they use force. instead of persuasion and example, and that such
force, owing to the absolute power which the superior has over
the life and death of his subordinate who has to submit to him
unconditionally, is finally applied in the shape of maltreaments.
All this is a natural and, humanly speaking, necessary concatenation
in which the new Japanese militarism, too, has promptly got entangled.
It is another dilemma of militarism.

The causes of such maltreatments are not to
be met with everywhere in a uniform degree. It is above all the
degree of popular education which exercises a strongly modifying
influence, and it is not surprising that even French colonial
militarism forms in this respect a favorable contrast to the Prussian-German
home militarism.

It is exactly in this form of exercising disciplinary
power, and just in that necessity by which it arises out of the
system, that we Socialists find an excellent weapon with which
to combat militarism fundamentally and most successfully, arousing
against it an ever growing portion of the people and carrying
class-consciousness into groups that otherwise could not yet be
reached or could only be reached with much greater difficulty.
The maltreatment of soldiers and military class-justice, one of
the most provoking phenomena of capitalist barbarism, are not
only dangerously undermining military discipline, they are also
the most effective weapons in the war for the liberation of the
proletariat. That sin of capitalism turns against capitalism itself
in two ways. However much the sinner may repent, honestly in helpless
contrition, or in the style of the fox in the fable, those weapons
can not be taken away from us; for though he appears in sackcloth
and ashes the sinner is irreclaimable.

↑The men that reorganized the entire Prussian army system after the Prussian army had been shattered at Jena by Napoleon, in 1806. [TRANSLATOR.]

↑In Manteuffel's sensible command of April 18, 1885, we read: "Insults attack the sense of honor and kill it, and the officer who insults his subordinates undermines his own position; for there is no dependence on the loyalty or bravery of him who allows himself to be insulted." . . . "In a word -- as the subordinates are treated by their superiors, from the general to the lieutenant thus they are."

↑A slight indication is furnished by the mass of deserters and men liable to military service who disobeyed orders to join the army. No less than 15,000 German deserters perished in the French colonial army during the first thirty years of the existence of the "splendid German Empire," whilst the bloody battle of Vionville in the Franco-German War resulted in only I6,000 men being killed and wounded.